#chris-eppstein

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Building a Jekyll Watcher with FSSM

Travis Tilley’s File System State Monitor provides a fantastic API for monitoring a filesystem and
performing actions when changes occur. It has multiple, platform-specific backends for dealing efficiently
with filesystems and will resort to polling if it has to. I have already integrated it into Compass
to implement the --watch functionality.

When building this blog, I used it to trivially build a watcher for changes to the blog contents and
regenerate the site using jekyll if anything changed. Coupled with serve, I can
basically forget that I’m developing a static website that has to be compiled. I’ve documented the basic
steps required to build your own watcher here.

Invoke It

About Me

I am an open source hacker and stylesheet architect at LinkedIn.
I live in San Jose, California with my wife and daughter.

Open Source

I'm the creator of Compass, a stylesheet authoring framework
and I'm on the core team of
Sass — the stylesheet syntax upon which Compass is built.
I maintain about a dozen less well known ruby libraries and rails plugins on
github,
and am an active contributor of patches to the many open source projects that I use.